NRG DASHBOARD

Fuel-Starved Haiti In Crisis As Venezuela Deal Dies

(Oilprice.com,
Tsvetana
Paraskova, 15.Apr.2019) — The poorest nation in the Western
hemisphere has seen its fuel supply increasingly challenged
since a program designed by Venezuela to supply fuel and gain influence in the
Caribbean collapsed last year amid the raging Venezuelan crisis.

Haiti
had received almost 70 percent of its fuel from Venezuela at the peak of the
so-called Petrocaribe program, under which Venezuela offered very attractive
financing to Caribbean nations to buy its refined oil products.

However,
after the Petrocaribe program collapsed
last year, Haiti was forced to turn to international markets for its fuel
supply. But without the Petrocaribe financing for oil, the Caribbean nation has
been struggling to find enough U.S. dollars to pay for the product deliveries,
and suppliers aren’t having it.

Physical
oil supply and trading company Novum Energy Trading Corp suspended
earlier this year fuel cargoes bound for Haiti because of overdue payments—and
this has exacerbated the fuel and energy crisis in the Caribbean country.

Novum
had been supplying fuels to Haiti via the Bureau of Monetization of Programs
and Development Aid (BMPAD) for more than four years.

“In
recent months, regretfully the payment performance of BMPAD has deteriorated
significantly,” Novum Energy’s chief financial officer Chris Scott said in a
statement in January 2019.

Earlier
this month, Novum Energy updated
the market on its operations in Haiti, saying that payments are “coming few and
far between.”

Although
Novum Energy has received a small portion of the overdue and outstanding
invoices, “the remaining US$39.7m of overdue invoices are now 60 days late
(which is on top of the 45 days of open credit Novum grants BMPAD),” it said.

Because
of the lack of regular payments, Novum’s vessel MT Nord Innovation, carrying
150,000 barrels of gasoline, has remained outside of Haiti since February 27,
“awaiting payments and a formal schedule of when we can expect to receive the
remaining amounts outstanding,” Scott said on April 4.

Meanwhile,
Haiti has been gripped in 2019 by anti-government protests, with protesters
demanding investigations into alleged misuse of the funds from the
Petrocaribe program, among other things.